Public Health Fora

The Public Health Fora, the premier academic forum of our academic calendar, welcomes speakers whose work engages and challenges the school community around our guiding principles and research directions.

Monday, April 29, 2019 | 4:30–6:30 p.m. | Hiebert LoungeMedicare for All. Is It Really Feasible?
Jon Kingsdale, Wakely Consulting and Boston University School of Public Health; Sara Rosenbaum, Milken Institute School of Public Health, George Washington University; Gail Wilensky, Project HOPE; and Jonathan Woodson, Boston University Institute for Health System Innovation & Policy, and Boston University School of Public Health. Cohosted with Boston University Institute for Health System Innovation and Policy.

Previous Fora

The Future of Population Health

The mission of Boston University School of Public Health is to improve the health of local, national, and international populations, particularly the disadvantaged, underserved, and vulnerable, through excellence and innovation in education, research, and service. The School’s Strategic Thinking Initiative, led by a steering committee of faculty, staff, students, and alumni during 2015, articulated four principles that underlie the future direction of the school, and four directions for our scholarship. Our 2016-2017 Public Health Fora, the premier academic forum of our academic calendar, welcomes speakers whose work engages and challenges the school community around these principles and research directions.

Our guiding principles

These guide the choices we pursue in all our activities, including scholarship, education and translation, to work towards a better, healthier, and more equitable world.

1. Significance

To make the world a healthier and more equitable place, we pay particular attention to issues that are especially likely to influence population health and to opportunities to improve population health and well-being.

2. Diversity

We aim to be a school that is inclusive and genuinely embraces diversity along many dimensions of difference, to institutionalize fora in which diverse identities and perspectives become routine; create enriched environments for education, scholarship and translation.

3. Equity

We seek to address both the causes and implications of inequities in health and within the School, engaging in systematic reflection on both external and internal structures, policies and practices that may create inequities.

4. Collaboration

We aim to engage the growing breadth and complexity of public health through embracing and encouraging collaboration across disciplines, institutions, and social and economic sectors.

Directions for Our Scholarship

Four broad areas of research focus represent significant opportunities for our school to contribute to improved population health and well-being. We aim to nurture and catalyze work in each of these areas over the coming decade.

1. Urban Living

By 2050, 66 percent of the world’s population is expected to be urban. The city’s social and physical structures influence how we think, feel, and behave. Scholarship on urban living encompasses research on critical issues affecting the health of populations, including employment opportunities, housing structures, food access, racial and socioeconomic discrimination and segregation, environmental pollution, social structures that encourage/discourage healthy living, substance use disorders and addiction, homelessness, crime, and the effects of climate change.

2. Aging and well-being

Changing demographics indicate that all major areas of the world except Africa will have about a quarter of their population aged 60 or over by 2050. The broader effects of aging-associated disability and disease on well-being in late life pose new challenges and offer opportunity for scholarship to improve population health and the capacity of aging populations to adapt and flourish.

3. Health across the lifecourse

A lifecourse perspective highlights the cumulative and interactive effects of many influences on health. A lifecourse approach can be used to understand the connection between individuals and the historical, environmental, and socioeconomic contexts in which they, and the populations of which they are part, live and the health outcomes that follow.

4. Health systems

The challenge of designing/improving systems that both proactively promote health for all and provide needed care for illness and injury increases with the complexity and cost of healthcare. As the need to integrate healthcare with other services and sectors also increases, health systems must become more flexible, providing opportunities for innovative scholarship and translation.